ALEXIS MADRIGAL was in his kitchen on Wednesday, March 4, when his phone rang. It was a warm, sunny evening in Oakland, California, and Madrigal, a staff writer at The Atlantic, was cooking dinner for his two children. On the line was Robinson Meyer, a colleague...
From Indy Media
Medical Workers Treating Coronavirus Are Resorting to Homemade Masks
Bryan White leaned in to greet his wife with a kiss on the forehead when she arrived home from a 12-hour shift at Salem Health, an Oregon hospital that’s had 19 confirmed cases of the coronavirus. “Nope, you don’t want that,” his wife told him as she rebuffed his...
THE GOVERNMENT’S SECRET VENTILATOR STOCKPILE IS NOWHERE NEAR ENOUGH TO FIGHT THE CORONAVIRUS
Only 16,600 ventilators. That’s the total number of breathing machines that sit in the Strategic National Stockpile, the government reserve meant to fortify overwhelmed hospitals in a crisis. It’s a small supplement to the U.S. medical system’s estimated 160,000 or so...
Beyond Narcissism, Trump’s Other Personality Flaws Are Putting Americans at Risk
Throughout the coronavirus crisis, critics of Donald Trump have repeatedly referenced his profound and outrageous narcissism. It was partly this pathology that led Trump to downplay the threat and resist widespread testing for weeks. An honest acknowledgement of the...
Trump and Wall Street Want to Send Us Back to Work. They Don’t Care If We Die of Coronavirus.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal editorial board argued for quickly lifting social-distancing health measures because these were hurting “the economy” — i.e., corporate profits. On Sunday, Goldman Sachs chairman Lloyd Blankfein echoed this call. And now it appears...
800,000 Doctors to Trump: Heed Expert Warnings and End Dangerous Campaign Against Social Distancing
A council representing more than 800,000 doctors across the U.S. signed a letter Friday imploring President Donald Trump to reverse his call for businesses to reopen by April 12, warning that the president's flouting of the guidance of public health experts could...
It’s Taken a Pandemic to Make Politicians Take Note of Our Basic Needs
The COVID-19 public health emergency is unleashing something most out of the ordinary in U.S. politics. From Blue California to Red Texas, we are seeing examples of creative thinking in how to help those worst hit by the health crisis as well as its resulting economic...
Under-the-Table Workers Are Left Out of the Paid Sick Leave Conversation
In the rush — or at least the pretense of rush — to bring immediate economic relief to the millions of average workers gutted by the tanking global economy brought on by the coronavirus, Democratic Party elites and centrist papers of record Washington Post and New...
Is the DNC Once Again Orchestrating the Defeat of a Socialist Candidate?
In 1944, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) ensured that socialist Henry Wallace would not succeed Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) as president. Is history repeating itself in 2020? Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders received the most votes in the first three...
Biden Is Winning, But Sanders’s Ideas May End Up Salvaging the Country
If we run last night’s events through the “Five W’s” of straight-up journalism, we don’t hit the reef until the end of the formula. Who? Joe Biden. What? Defeated Bernie Sanders in three key primaries. Where? In Florida, Illinois and Arizona. When? Last night....